XXX Международный конгресс ИИСАА. 19–21 июня 2019 г. Т. 2

Секция XVI 126 XXX Международный Конгресс по источниковедению и историографии стран Азии и Африки Law, demanding a legislation focusing on population control instead. Furthermore, Japan’s defeat also fuelled fears over the population “quality”, leading to discussions about the necessity of a stronger eugenics law. In 1948, the Japanese Diet approved of the Eugenic Protection Law (yūsei hogo hō), the purpose of which was to “to prevent the birth of eugenically inferior offspring, and to protect maternal health and life” (Norgren 2001: 145). 1 The law, which existed until 1996, authorized 1) voluntary and involuntary eugenic operations (sterilizations) of people suffering from one of the ailments listed in the appendix, and 2) abortion under certain circumstances. About 16,500 people underwent eugenic operations under the law, most of which were performed in the 1950s and 1960s. The majority of victims were women (about 70 %), who had mental illness or intellectual disability. With archival documents being mostly inaccessible, details of the operations were largely unknown until recently, but SatoYumi’s lawsuit in 2018 prompted most municipalities to provide documents to researchers and journalists. Kanagawa Prefectural Archives store a set of documents concerning forced sterilizations in the prefecture, including statistics, “rules” for sterilizations, Eugenic Protection Commission proceedings, and deliberative assembly records. It needs to be mentioned that Kanagawa Prefecture was by no means the leader in the number of forced sterilization (most operations were performed in Hokkaido and Miyagi, 2593 and 1406 respectively), but it had the biggest number of operations in the country performed under Article 12, which allowed sterilizations of people having non-hereditary conditions (whereas Article 4 covered only hereditary conditions). In the prefecture, overall about 403 non-consensual sterilizations were performed. As deliberative assembly records (1962, 1970) demonstrate, physicians applied for an operation to a Eugenic Protection Commission, which consisted of about 10–12 members, usually lawyers, physicians, and superintendents of care institutions. After the application was filed, the commission initiated an investigation on the personal history of the concerned person, including heath condition, medical history, family tree, and life conditions. For instance, in the case of a woman whose name and age is deleted, it is mentioned that given her low IQ (19) and inability to care for herself, it was advisable to sterilize her. Or, in the case of another woman suffering from mental illness, it is written that she had an abnormal interest towards men, and therefore qualified for sterilization. Records demonstrate that deliberations lasted from several months to a year, and in most cases commissions approved of the sterilization. Records also show, that ability to adapt in society, to care for oneself, etc., often played a more important role than the heritability of the concerned person’s condition. 1 Tiana Norgren. Abortion before Birth Control: The Politics of Reproduction in Postwar Japan . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.